You are here

open source

For a sekrit mobile :-) project I am doing with Jen, looking for open source python code that uses NewMediaObject on XML-RPC or the equivalent in the Atom Publishing Protocol to post photos and videos. Jen has looked and only found code to do text blog posts. Lazyweb?

2. Make a telco as simple to set up as a wordpress blog. Wireless meshes, least-cost-routing, etc. Let’s make as much of that complexity disappear into default behaviours that can be tweaked as the owner/entrepreneur becomes more comfortable with the product.

3. Be as open as possible. This is more of a philosophical than a practical constraint. We believe we can attract maximum participation by making software and hardware as open as possible. We believe that Open Hardware strategies devices like the Mesh Potato can change the way people think about hardware.

Interesting. I still think that S60 needs a drastic UI overhaul and simplification to compete with the iPhone long term and that Nokia would be better off with a Linux core for their mobile phones rather than Symbian and S60 but we'll see. Go Open Source S60 go! Does this mean both S60 and S40 will be 100% open source within 2 years? As the cliché goes, the devil is in the details!

Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

I am glad I can finally announce that Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght. Needless to say I am stoked and already enjoying working with my new colleagues. Working with Bryght has been great, the best job of my life and I am sure it will be the same at Raincity.

We can finally take the wraps off something we have been cooking up for a while. Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght (press release)! The expanded company will operate under the Raincity Studios banner and the Bryght name will live on through the hosting products (i.e. Bryght Light Sites and Bryght Virtual Private Servers will continue). Raincity Studios will also continue Bryght's work in leading edge technology like Jabber / XMPP and OpenID. And of course, all Bryght guys are now Raincity guys!

Got an advance briefing about Open Komodo (initially a portion of Komodo Edit combined with other open source goodies) which is an open source client side (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) web application development platform from our friends at ActiveState and Mozilla. Add debugging and PHP support (hopefully soon, LazyWeb ?!?) and you have a killer open source Drupal development environment as well as one for XUL based Rich Internet Apps and CSS/HTML/JavaScript Web Apps (e.g. iPhone apps). Can't wait to try it and see how it evolves!

We shouldn’t dismiss lightly the propensity for opensource to innovate, to augment innovation and to accelerate innovation, for the following reasons:

The diversity inherent in the crowd creates long-tail effects, and this causes the bazaar to come up with stuff that the cathedral wouldn’t consider; in cases where the cathedral does consider the innovation, the bazaar is often faster and cheaper; and finally, while tight coordination by central authority seems a worthwhile thing, we should not forget the number of camels designed by committees.

In fact that’s one of the key stanchions of opensource communities. They don’t do camels.

I'm really enjoying the Nokia N800 that I received from the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. Surprisingly, Nokia have made Linux almost usable :-) . Seriously, it's fast enough and does what it does well (of course what is the market for the N800? I think it's a great portable Linux computer for geeks and cheap phone and video call power users today!). I am not a big fan of the stylus so I am happy that you can use your fingers. Going to have to try to go a day without my laptop once I have all the apps installed (irc client, ssh client, and a few others).

I think Jon is onto something. Mesh sounded great (could people blog more podcasts and videoblogs of the conference please? That's it, my goal will be to make sure that Northern Voice 2007 is 100% podcasted and videoblogged at decent quality, sorry Tim but not everybody can do awesome HD video for everything) but we are missing the common Web 2.0 thread that "meshes" everything together which I think lies somewhere in open source, ubiquitous inexpensive broadband (fixed today and mobile tomorrow), RSS, people (not just white male Californians, but women, Canadians, Indians, Filipinos :-) , etc.) and "Silicon Valley everywhere" (including Vancouver in my biased opinion with great startups like sxip, Dabble DB, eqo, etc.)

There was lots of good content and obviously some great energy. I'm sure the successes of the show were a happy mix of good planning and putting everyone together to share and feed off each other. I definitely learned a lot, but for someone who is on a steady diet of VoIP and telecom conferences like VON, Internet Telephony and Globalcomm, this is a different world in many ways. Didn't hear much talk about VoIP or podcasting or SIP - stuff like that. But that's ok - Web 2.0 is about so many things.

And that's where the challenge lies for me. A lot of great perspectives were put forward at Mesh - both from the speakers and the attendees. However, there wasn't a lot of connecting the dots - maybe by design - but I'm left with the feeling that for as much as I learned, I still don't have a sense how these things fit together.

This actually brings me back again to the Mesh logo. You can't help but be drawn into that image and the energy it seems to radiate - which is exactly what happened at the show - so, kudos for the logo designers. The energy was there alright, but like the logo, I didn't really feel that all the strands - yellow, blue, green, etc. - connected. They're oscillating around each other, and bumping into each other a lot, but never really intersecting or truly meshing into a unified form. At the end of the day, much like Earth at Creation, I'd like to see this humming mass of energy and chaos sort itself out and unravel nicely like a ball of yarn.

My conclusion is that this did not happen, and I'm concerned that for some, the conference was just a blur, like this....

Hey college students, want to spend your summer writing Drupal code while getting paid by Google? Sign up to participate in the Summer of Code 2006 program and that's exactly what you could be doing.

As of May 1, Google is now accepting applications from students. You've only got until May 8th to get them in, so you'd better get on it.

Make sure to check out the list of proposed Drupal projects for inspiration. Your personal project ideas are also very welcome, so don't hesitate to deviate from the published list.

The Drupal community is absolutely dedicated to your success, and each student accepted to work on a Drupal project will have two personal mentors to work with. There is also a team of people standing by to answer your questions or help you with your application.

When commercial software is free software -- publicly licensed -- the customer for that software can always get what they want by working with a coop or NPO. This means that the customer can always get their software by paying a fair share of the cost of development.

It's very fine that the customer can always get the free software they need by paying a fair share of the cost of development but that is a problem for developers who want access to investment capital. A developer who wants access to investment capital must have a good chance of returning a profit -- not merely breaking even on cost of development.

So my proposal is that some developers can be paid in shares of their customer's stock instead of cash.

If you issue stock, it is usually easy to grant someone else some of your stock in a way that costs you less in cash than it would cost to buy that same stock.

Now if a developer, paid in stock, immediately sells that stock for cash -- they earn just the cost of production but no profit on top of that.

On the other hand, if a developer paid in stock holds on to that stock, and the customer of the developer's program flourishes, the stock will rise in value. Later in time, the developer can sell the stock and get back the cost of development, plus interest, *plus a profit*.

A free software developer who can make a profit that way has access to investment capital. Such a developer is truly on an equal footing with proprietary developers, from an economic perspective.

I don't believe people and companies are naturally opposed, but rather that the kinds of corporate creatures that dominated and oppressed their ways through the Industrial Age were advantaged by a lack of power among individuals on the demand sides of marketplaces, and a producer/consumer asymmetry that no longer exists - not now that consumers can produce as well, which is one very significant aspect of open source: the demand side supplying itself.

+1 on learning from WordPress. I think a big part of WordPress's success (beside the fact that it's an excellent blogging system) is that it's open-source. Open Source Ning and I think the success will be much greater. Imagine if you could only run .NET apps on Microsoft servers? Nobody would develop .Net apps. It's the same with Ning, either make it open source or let people run it on their servers and the apps will come. Until this happens the current Ning lock-in means nobody will develop apps for it.

So what happens if you apply the Wordpress model to all web applications? You could create a piece of social software, then allow others to write plugins for it. Further down the line, create a hosted solution for those who can't code and let them assemble an app from the various modules. Of course, many bloggers create Wordpress plugins to scratch their own itch, so maybe social software wouldn't fly in the same way. But I still get the sense that Ning could have benefited from the radical decentralization that open source software provides. Instead, they%u2019ve built themselves a walled-garden for web applications - and walled gardens inevitably get torn down.

And it's just as functional (or dysfunctional :-) !) as any other community out there based on my observation of the Drupal community. Speaking of the Drupal Community, about 100 of its developers and users and those in between (like myself since I am no longer a developer) will be at the Open Source CMS and Blog Tool Summit Feb 7-9, 2006 and I believe we will actually talk about community in one of the sessions.

Over at O'Reilly, John Mark Walker writes There Is No Open Source Community, and Nicholas Carr, who enjoys decrying, well, anything popular, chimes in with The Amorality of Open Source. They both paint a picture of misguided innocents who believe in some starry-eyed vision of post-capitalist intellectual collectivism, but are actually pawns in the hands of larger economic forces. They're both really wrong.

I am helping organize the OSCMSBTS (because don't you know we need more acronyms!) with Boris, Chad and Angie. I am helping out with the venue and contacting the Roller and Plone people (the others are contacting the other open source blogging and CMS tool projects) please email me roland AT bryght.com, skype me: rtanglao or call me at +1 604 729 7924 and help plan the Roller and Plone specific parts of the program as well as of course planning the cross CMS program about identity, spam, themeing, etc..

This is the official first post announcing planning of the Open Source CMS and Blogging Tools Summit. I'm taking the opportunity of the Northern Voice conference (and especially the spirit of Moose Camp) to try and put together a mini-conference of a variety of open source communities.

The great thing about open source is that we can all share and learn from each other. Our only goal is to make our own "product" better and -- unlike proprietary systems -- there is a large incentive to work together on shared areas of interest. This is made even easier when there are other areas of overlap, like the standard "stack" of technologies that support these tools, from the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and Python/Perl/PHP coding languages.

I met with Zak Greant on Friday, who is an evangelist working with ez Systems, makers of the ezPublish CMS. Roland is going to be contacting local representatives of the Plone community, like Enfold Systems. Of course, the Drupal community will be here, with Dries Buytaert and other developers convening in Vancouver for our North American meetup (thanks Chad and Angie for kickstarting discussions about that).